Why didn't anyone tell me about The Big Bang???

Originally posted by lobotomizemecapin
Anyways the big bang obviously has flaws almost as much as any other religious text. Most atheists I know dont believe in the big bang theory.

What flaws are you referring to?

Originally posted by MentorsRiddle

This is completely amazing to me – especially considering that the elementary laws of science claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed.

Don't mean to nitpick but I thought it was energy that cannot be created or destroyed? Or is it the same thing?

reply to post by MentorsRiddle

On a serious note: we are all different. We all have different beliefs and ideas. It is never a good idea to bash someone else’s faith, and is downright mean spirited. We all live in a smelting pot, which we call Earth. While here we will all have different ideas and concepts on what shapes and molds our reality.

There are people in prison that fully believe it's okay to rape and batter women. There are people that believe it's okay to send our children off to be killed in a war. There are people in power that think the citizens belong to them.

So, we shouldn't bash them? If you say, yes, it's okay to bash THOSE people, then where and who is allowed to draw the line on what can be bashed and what can't be bashed?

reply to post by MentorsRiddle

My deepest hope is that the members of ATS can begin to communicate in a more rational and comprehensive way, and perhaps begin to focus more on why we are all here: our love of conspiracy.

I thought we were here to 'Deny Ignorance'. As in, ideas and beliefs that suffer from a total lack of scientific evidence. As an atheist I believe the smartest response to the question of how the universe was made is, "I don't know."

As an atheist I believe the most ignorant response is that an all-knowing, all-powerful, invisible being that has no beginning and no end, created the whole universe, and who lives in another dimension called heaven. A being who is perfect in every way, and uses his power to kill, punish, and torture.

If I do not confront this wholly irrational belief, then I am not actively denying ignorance. Quite the opposite, if I am not allowed to confront it, then the site motto should be changed to: Tolerate Ignorance.

Originally posted by MentorsRiddle

A part of me is baffled by non-believers. When a child tells me about santa bringing him presents on Christmas - I don't belittle the child, and say, "You are so stupid for thinking that," etc. So why whould anyone who doesn't believe get so upset at religious people? Shouldn't they get equally worked up about the Easter Bunny, or Santa Clause, or the Tooth Fairy?

You use a child as reference. What if your 35 yr old son believed in Santa Claus, the bunny and tooth fairy? Wouldn't he be a total embarrassment to you? Wouldn't you hold an intervention that might even come down to screaming at him for being such an idiot?

Originally posted by MentorsRiddle
My honest thoughts are as follows:

I think the more we advance in our science, the closer we will come to God.

Sorry. Throughout mankind's history every fact-based discovery has killed the gods, piece by piece.
Volcano god - dead.
Ocean god - dead.
Storm god - dead.
Sun god - dead.
The more we learn, the more the gods die.

Originally posted by Lichter daraus

Well me personally, i believe in a creator but i also believe in a big bang. I sincerely wanna know what that says about me or what that makes me. I'm just curious what my fellow ats members think.

edit on 07/16/2009 by Lichter daraus because: (no reason given)

It says you're a tiny bit gullible, but wide open to reason if one day it is spelled out clearly enough for you to understand. That's not a bad place to be.

Originally posted by Wandering Scribe
reply to post by MentorsRiddle

 

Atheism is not a religion. It is just a lack of belief in a higher power. Not all atheists adhere to evolution, or the big bang; nor do they have "faith" in these things. A deity denotes some kind of conscience, or at the very least consciousness, which an act such as the big bang lacks. There is no intelligence, emotion, thought, or personality behind the big bang, unlike any mono/polytheistic deity.

What needs to happen, is that the theistic among us need to realize that religion, faith, and spirituality are personal endeavors; being so, they should remain only with the individual, and out of school, politics, and communal activities. Keep your faith in your church, and let science, reason, and experimentation lead the way elsewhere.

Religion plays off of emotions: feeling loved, and like you're the "center of everything" to some god. Science builds off of reason, and logic; evolving and rewriting itself as we discover the reality of previously unknown situations. Emotion should never lead the pursuit of truth or reason.

Everyone would get along just fine if religion quit trying to become a political and scientific institution, and instead stayed put where it belongs: filed under belief, not fact.

~ Wandering Scribe

Religion makes us or tries to make us better persons unlike scinece which is based on someones imagination. science is always proving itself wrong and has many theories but religion sticks to one story.

After exhausting the funding for 1 theory, scientists bring up another theory to get more funding. Instead of searching for the origin of the universe, why can't we use all the funding involved to improve the lives of millions of people around the world?.

Whoever thought of the big bang theory was very high on something. How someone can even think that a random event can produce such perfectly balanced and organised universe is beyond my wildest imagination. Consider the perfect distance between planets, the occurence of day and night resulting from the perfect spinning of the earth, etc, etc.

You cannot just bang some metals together and expect to get a car or randomly throw some mud and get a house.

Nothing exists that wasnt made, even honey is made by bees. everything has a maker and one day, we'll know how that maker came into existence if he wishes to tell us.

reply to post by thelastghostface


Obvious troll is obvious.

Second line.

~ Wandering Scribe

Originally posted by jiggerj

Originally posted by MentorsRiddle

A part of me is baffled by non-believers. When a child tells me about santa bringing him presents on Christmas - I don't belittle the child, and say, "You are so stupid for thinking that," etc. So why whould anyone who doesn't believe get so upset at religious people? Shouldn't they get equally worked up about the Easter Bunny, or Santa Clause, or the Tooth Fairy?

You use a child as reference. What if your 35 yr old son believed in Santa Claus, the bunny and tooth fairy? Wouldn't he be a total embarrassment to you? Wouldn't you hold an intervention that might even come down to screaming at him for being such an idiot?

I see grown ups of all ages proclaiming that they're "Rational" or "reasonable" or that they're somehow "more moral" than other people.

1) rationality does not exist. It has not and cannot be scientifically proven. This is nothing more than the belief in the easter bunny

2) same as 1

3) same as 1

In my opinion anyone who talks about morality or rationality is an idiot. Where is your science to prove that it exists? that's right you have none. go back to believing in imaginary things

reply to post by MentorsRiddle


Your premise is flawed because your understanding of the "big bang" assumes a closed system. None of the current theories as to what came before the so called "big bang" assume a prior nothingness. In fact, superstring theory postulates eternal inflation, wherein new "universes" nucleate and "inflate" from within existing universes, creating new universes continuously.

Many cosmologists have theorized that the universe didn't actually begin with an infinitely compressed seed containing the chaotic root of all matter and energy described by the so called "big bang." Rather -- they postulate a collision between two or more three dimensional universes creating a tear the width of a proton, which flooded matter and energy from one, into the other, rapidly expanding into bubble which grew to the "size" of our existing universe, a little over 14 billion years ago. This process produces new universes all the time, and may indicate a multiverse which is continuous, one big "bang" after another.

None of this speaks to the human need for simple explanations, nor is it meant to. The conflict between "god" and cosmology is largely semantic, and not necessarily representative of the truly interesting questions faced by scientists and philosophers each day. Like the universe, the best is characterized by forward movement, and energy.

If you take the blue shift, your universe collapses and becomes a stasis generating field of no-possibility. If you choose the red shift, the entire multiverse goes up for grabs. Don't look down.

I find it interesting that most people are not aware that the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe was originally proposed by Georges Lemaître, a priest.

Yes, this line of thought predates medieval philosophy, but a priest formulated it before Edwin Hubble. Hubble actually provided a comprehensive observational foundation for Lemaître's theory.

en.wikipedia.org...

Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to derive what is now known as the Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'.

Granted, he was a secular priest. Not many are even aware that they exist